The Far Empty

by J. Todd Scott

  • • •

  He drove away, down Main, past the Hamilton with the broken N, like a fist had been put through it, and the Dollar General and Modelle Greer’s and Bartel’s Gas. Past the Sonic drive-in and the Radio Shack and the sign for Donnie Ray Royal, Attorney at Law, and the small U.S. post office. He sat for a bit beneath the sodium yellow lights of the Hi n Lo and then took the long curve of Appian Way past Big Bend Central and Archer-Ross Stadium. He turned circles in the stadium’s lot, round and round, as the stars above wheeled in the opposite direction.

  He cruised out to Beantown, to Mancha’s, which was strangely quiet and dark, and all the small homes nearby, clustered together and painted in garish colors. He made them brighter, driving up and down the dusty alleys with his lights flashing—a blue-and-red electrical storm that brought no one to their windows. No one even looked out, no one cared. He might have been all alone in the world.

  He took 67 and drove out toward the Lights as fast as the truck would go—all the windows down and the inside of the car like a captured tornado. The truck rattled and shook, and when he got to the little pavilion for the Lights he drove right on through the gravel out onto the caliche itself, bouncing over rocks and ruts, crushing ocotillo and anything else that wouldn’t get out of his path. The only lights were his own high beams, and had there been other wraiths waiting for him, he would have chased those as far as they could take him. Instead, he turned his head lamps off and screamed at the top of his old lungs and plowed through the darkness trying to find the end of the world, to drive off it, but there was no end. The Big Bend, the Far Empty, just went on forever and ever and ever.

  Dirt and rocks sprayed against his windshield like gunfire and he fought the wheel and himself and when the ground did not finally raise up to swallow him whole and drop him down a black throat, he knew he was done. He ground the truck to a halt and listened to the engine tick, as all the echoes he’d thrown slowly worked their way back to him over the desert. Even his own, still screaming.

  Then he turned around and drove for home.

  26

  DUANE

  He realized, as he searched for a Dr Pepper in the kitchen and then wandered through the rooms, that he’d never actually been in the Judge’s house. Through the years, he’d been summoned up to the porch, stood in the driveway. He’d been out back in the yard and may have made it as far as the garage, but never, ever inside its walls. The Judge liked his privacy and his safety. He often talked about a home being a sanctuary, and had a three-thousand-dollar alarm system to prove it. So it had been all the more strange when Duane walked up and found the door already standing open for him, waiting. Don’t mind if I do! He thought he saw his daddy there, holding it ajar for him, and thanked him for his help.

  He wandered a bit, eventually went upstairs and searched Caleb’s room and found kid stuff. Then he went into the Judge’s room and tossed a few things around. He sidestepped the shattered mirror and found the Ruger rifle behind the door; thought the grip still felt warm where it had recently been held, checked to make sure it was loaded. He carried it with him as he moved along.

  It had been while he was out at the Comanche, watching his little Mex girl and waiting for her to work up the nerve to finally try and kill him, that Melissa’s call had come through. She’d been angry, near screaming—told him everything he already knew about the Judge, how Duane was supposed to have died right along with Chris at the Far Six. She told him Caleb had come to see Chris, and now Chris, who was still hurt—more than bad—was coming back to town to end it, once and for all. Murfee wasn’t big enough for all of them anymore. The world wasn’t big enough.

  Then she’d offered Duane anything—everything—if he promised to make sure the Judge never hurt anyone else ever again. You kill that son of a bitch, Duane Dupree, you kill him . . .

  There was a woman lying in the bathtub, and he had to admit, it startled the hell out of him. He walked into the Judge’s dark bathroom and she was there, reclining in the big old dry tub, her pale skin holding its own light, like moonbeams on glass. Her eyes were closed and her dark hair was a tumble that was her only pillow. Her long, thin hands were at her side, one of them lying across a belly that he knew would be as soft and warm to the touch as anything. He followed the gentle path of her body down to her legs, to the darkness between them, and felt himself get hard in a way he hadn’t in weeks.

  He recognized her even though he’d never seen her quite this way. It was Nellie Banner, who’d been dead for more years than he could quite remember. She was another ghost and her eyes were open and they were wolf’s eyes just like his, glowing and hot and angry, and her lips moved as she whispered, Come closer, oh, please come closer. She had so many things to tell him, and he was welcome to look at her while she did so. You kill that son of a bitch, Duane Dupree, you kill him . . .

  She wasn’t reflected in the bathroom mirror, but for that matter, he wasn’t, either. He was a ghost, already gone, a dead man. He knew none of it was real, just the foco turning the last of his sanity to dust, but he didn’t care. So he went and knelt next to Nellie, smelled water that wasn’t there and put his ear close to her dead mouth, and listened to all of her secrets.

  He’d taken so much foco he thought his heart would explode. He could feel each individual beat, each one labored, popping a bloody sweat right off his skin. He’d already thought about taking his old buck knife, his daddy’s Model 110, and cutting his skin off. He didn’t need the skin now—it was too tight and too hot and it squeezed him something terrible—so earlier he had cut himself a little before heading out to the Comanche, just to test the thought: a slice across his arms, across his belly, and even with a fair amount of his very real blood, he’d known it was the right thing to do. It wasn’t the blood or the pain that finally stopped him. In fact he didn’t really feel any of the hurt, and the knife edge proved no different from picking at his skin with his own nails. Later, if he survived any of this, he was going to start in earnest at his face and work down, shedding it all. Revealing once and for all the wolf underneath. He’d stopped only because he had a few other things to attend to first—things that definitely needed human hands.

  He was curled in the Judge’s bed, naked and bloody, when the door opened downstairs, the one he’d closed and locked behind him. He was grinning when he popped up and went to the hall, the Ruger out in front of him, his shotgun slung over his back. He’d left the lights off, just like he found them, but it didn’t matter because it seemed to him that everything glowed green, clean and clear and visible. He came to the top of the stairs and saw the crown of the Judge’s head passing below him, moving toward the kitchen. The fridge opened, and light bloomed bright. He had to blink back tears, it was so hard to see through. When his vision cleared, he came down the stairs slow, cautious, and backed into the family room, gun pointed at the open arch where he knew the Judge would appear.

  The Judge nearly walked into the open mouth of his gun. In the gloom his eyes went wide, caught their own startled light. He had a Lone Star in his hand, and he let it slip from his fingers. It hit the ground between them, rolled in a tight circle, bleeding beer in its wake. His hand moved toward the gun at his hip, his Colt XSE—a gun that had been given to him as a present by the Sheriffs Association of Texas—but Duane shook the Ruger at him to let him know he was serious. Dead serious.

  “Just slip the hand back, Judge. Sorry you had to waste a cold one. Guess I got the drop on you.”

  The Judge gaped at him, unbelieving. “Dupree, get some fucking clothes on and get that fucking gun out of my face. You hear me? Or I will whip the dog shit out of you.” The Judge looked closer. “Fuck, are you bleeding?” His voice had a tightness that Duane had never heard. If he didn’t know better, it sounded like goddamn fear.

  The Judge finally raised a hand, just one, not his gun hand, though. “Look, don’t make this worse, right? I saw Cherry just now. He�
�s out for both of us. That’s our problem.”

  “Naw, he’s really out for just you, Judge, just you. You can’t slip out of that noose. Now comes the reckoning.”

  “Goddammit, Duane, you’re not the first person to point a gun at me today, but by God, you will be the last.”

  Duane laughed. “You might take that as a hint, Judge.”

  The Judge spoke slowly, carefully. “If you don’t stop now, you’re not walking out of here. I can’t allow it. You know that.”

  “Oh, I know it. Don’t care. Not really atall.” Duane loosened his shoulders, relaxed and breathed and took better aim at the Judge’s face. As jittery and wired as he’d been for months, he was suddenly calm, cool, like he’d been standing still for hours in the cold desert night. And then Chava was standing in the hallway behind the Judge, his gold tooth grinning in the dark—a skull. Chava waved at him, urging him on, empty eye sockets and face curtained with blood. Duane waved back. Next to Chava was Rudy Ray, screaming silently.

  “You eat your own, Judge, that’s what you do. You eat your own.” Chava was gone now, replaced by the girl he’d set on fire. She glowed and smoldered in the dark, ash drifting from the hand she pointed at him. She smeared the air, like a dirty fingerprint on glass. “Everything I ever did was on your word. ’Cause of you.”

  “Now that is horseshit, Duane.”

  “I see their faces and they have holes where their eyes should be. All the things you did, and it’s me they’re comin’ for . . . I’m haunted, Judge, so haunted. And they’ve been waiting for this for a long time.” The air between them was charged, moving on its own, as if they had an audience. “I even talked to Nellie upstairs in the tub. Goddamn, she was a beautiful woman. They’re here right now. They’re holding breath they don’t even have and they’re waiting to clap their dead hands after I blow your head off.”

  “It’s okay, son. I understand. I really do.”

  Duane sighted down the rifle at the Judge’s empty, open mouth. “There’s no way you can.”

  “No, Duane, no, goddammit.” The Judge pointed at him. “You’re sick, dying . . . a goddamn dead man.”

  Duane saw all the rest of the dead staring at him, and spit blood at the Judge’s boot.

  “We all are.”

  The Judge went for the Colt.

  The room lit up with muzzle flashes, everything so loud. Duane fired round after round, standing stock-still, bracing himself with his legs, leaning into the rifle’s kick. It was smooth as oil, greased like lightning, the finest gun he’d ever shot. Someone had taken real good care of it, for just this moment. A window blew out and stuffing from the couch floated in the air. He thought he might be hit, but couldn’t quite feel it and couldn’t have cared less. It was possible the Judge’s head came off in a powerful spray, so hard and fast that it hit the ceiling. There was a lot of blood, he knew that—so much blood, like Eddie Corazon’s—and all of it everywhere and on everything. A real goddamn reckoning right here in the living room.

  He knew it was all over when he heard the ghosts clapping.

  27

  MÁXIMO

  It was cold outside, and he hugged his arms against his body to keep warm.

  She’d dropped him at Pilar’s, still crying, and wouldn’t talk. But he’d gone out right after she left, begging Pilar to show him how to start and stop her little car, giving her a kiss with lots of tongue for her efforts and leaving her smiling. He’d paid close attention when America first brought him out here, and it wasn’t hard to find again. Everything here was straight lines, one direction. The roads had been his alone, and although he had trouble bringing the car to a nice stop, he did well enough to leave it crooked in the dark against a fence line, off the road. The only crooked thing in forever, all the fences like chewed toothpicks, thin and broken, marching off into the distance. He walked the rest of the way, cutting across pasture and broken land and pecan groves, guided by moonlight to the little house out here all alone. He curled up at the corner of the porch, and waited. Ten paciencia. He was still there when truck headlights came down the gravel drive.

  • • •

  He smelled blood, a smell he knew all too well. The man reeked of it as he stumbled free of the truck, tried to walk toward his front door, and Máximo knew in a way he couldn’t say that not all the blood on the man was his own, but enough of it was. Enough that if Máximo melted back into the darkness, this man might fall down and die on his own. But he might not. And all Máximo had to do was remember America screaming and throwing her phone after him, her tears and the darkness of her eyes, to push him forward. He remembered what his abuela once said, while he sat with a face like a rock after his papa had gone away—

  Llora, niño, porque los que no tienen lágrimas tienen un dolor que no se acaba nunca.

  Cry, for those without tears have a grief that never ends.

  He hadn’t cried, not then, not later. He’d since learned there were so many other ways to deal with grief. He rose out of the darkness by the porch, came straight at the man, who rocked on his feet and spotted him, neither surprised nor afraid nor anything at all.

  The man might have said, “Daddy?”

  He didn’t even bother with Rodolfo’s old gun. Máximo brought a knife to the man’s throat. It was bloody work, so much blood, to take the man’s head. And the knife wasn’t a good one, just something he’d taken from Pilar’s cocina. Not that he needed the head—not that America would want to see it or that he could take it back across the river to show what he had done. He did it so that after, when he went to her and said something funny and made her laugh and wrapped his tired arms around her, she would feel them still quivering from all his effort, and she would know that it was done. He knew, in the same way he knew that all the blood was not the man’s own, that the other gringo he’d come for—the real jefe—was already dead as well. The killing was done.

  He set the head aside and pissed on the body, and then kicked in a window of the house and searched around. He was supposed to look for the dinero, but there was very little, not enough, and those across the river did not want it anyway—it was tainted, venenoso. They would not dirty their hands with it—planning to burn it as a sacrifice—because it was never about the money for them, until it was. Just ask Chava. No, the ayudante’s ruined body was the mensaje, all because they’d felt disrespected, cheated, and because of whatever visions floated in that oily mixture of blood and water swirling in their big bowls. Whatever their reasons, they were not his reasons now. He did this thing for her.

  He kept looking until he found enough matches and oil and dirty clothes, piling them throughout the living room and out onto the porch, dumping an armload of newspaper over the body. He sat the head on top of that and filled its mouth with the small amount of money he’d found, and lit that on fire. Flames moved inside the skull, behind the eyes, glowing, as Máximo set the rest of the house on fire.

  When he jumped off the porch, he thought he spied a creature slinking off into the darkness with him, something that had been watching him all along—a lobo. The only ones he’d ever seen before were caged at the rancho—dirty, desperate things, and he had always wanted to see one free, running wild. He would tell America about it, and they could guess together at what it might mean.

  He didn’t look back, not once, didn’t think any more about the man or the house or the blood or the fire. He kept walking until the burning house was well behind him; then he broke into a run, pretending that he was a lobo, wild and free, forever. The flames at his back rose higher and higher and higher until they washed away the whole sky.

  GHOSTS

  1

  ANNE

  They saw each other every once in a while in passing, as they had before, but different. They couldn’t really talk, not then, but he smiled at her and she smiled back, if they thought no one was looking. It had finally started to warm up,
the wan earth gaining color, coming back to life.

  Like so many things.

  • • •

  It was a week before school was due to let out when they ran into each other outside the Hi n Lo. Chris looked so different, thinner but healthier, even with the cane he needed to walk. But she looked different too, letting her hair go back to its normal shade, wearing her contacts again. She was afraid he might just say a quick hello and keep going, but he didn’t. He asked her to stay awhile, and she did.

  They talked about all that happened after—all the noise that had surrounded Murfee, as if the Fall Carnival had returned and spilled out over the wide streets. There had been so much shock and sadness at Sheriff Ross’s death at the hands of Duane Dupree, and then Dupree’s own fiery demise. Everyone knew the story, or as in any small town, thought they did—a popular sheriff betrayed by his chief deputy, his best friend, who’d been corrupted and paid for it all with his life. They both agreed it made a good story—a damn good one. And when all the investigations and media inquiries failed to turn up anything different, and then after those had all gone away too, the story was all anyone had left.

  Sheriff Ross was buried a hero, a true lawman of the West. Over two thousand people showed up at his funeral.

  She asked how he liked being sheriff now, and he said it wasn’t permanent, not yet. He’d cleaned out the department, fired nearly everyone except Miss Maisie, and although the town council had handed him the badge, there was still an open election set for later in the spring. So far no one had come forward to oppose him, but he’d have to wait and see. He guessed everyone liked a hero.

  Truth be told, he wasn’t sure Murfee was ready for a sheriff with a bad leg and a damaged shooting hand and a weak heart, but she laughed and said that was the exactly the sort of sheriff they needed, now more than ever.